Had Ford held on to the presidency, it would have changed the trajectory of American politics — potentially by denying Reagan his time in the White House.
Notably, Ford would have won despite losing the popular vote — the first time a popular vote loser won the presidency at that point since Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Ford also would have faced a Congress dominated by the opposition party Democrats, with little mandate to try to bend them to his will.
Yet as the sitting president, Ford would have been the most visible target for the discontent that the late 1970’s would bring to an America grappling for the first time in decades with structural economic woes.
Inflation, which had proven impervious to Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” public relations campaign, grew steadily, fueled by a second “oil shock” that once again led to long gas lines. Ford would have begun his first full term with a 5.2 percent inflation rate; by March of 1978 it had almost doubled, and it stayed in double digits throughout the next two years. That inflation meant trouble in a wide range of fields, from the cost of a mortgage to a new automobile to prices at the supermarket.
The plummeting approval ratings that hit Jimmy Carter — he was disapproved of by a 54-33 percent margin at the end of 1979 — would likely have befallen Ford as well.
Of course, Ford would have been in a very different position than Carter; having served more than half of Richard Nixon’s second term, Ford would have been ineligible to run again for the presidency in 1980 under the provisions of the 22nd Amendment. It would have fallen to a new candidate to attempt to hold the White House for the Republicans for a fourth consecutive term — something neither party had done (with the exception of the FDR-Truman five-term run) since 1908.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan could run against the beleaguered Carter administration and the Democrat-dominated Congress by pledging a wholesale rejection of the party in power. With a Republican like Ford in the White House, it would be difficult for Reagan — or any other Republican — to make a blistering critique of business as usual. There is a reason why only one president in the last century has managed to turn the White House over to a candidate of their own party, and Ford would have faced that challenge with bleak economic conditions.